Lingering Hours
by Alpacca Joe
Summary: What would life have been like if, instead of Highland, the Morgendorffers had lived in Dallas before moving to Lawndale? A moment in an alternate life of Daria Morgendorffer.


"**Lingering Hours**"  
1/09/11

It was a Wednesday, just after eight o'clock. Out in the world of real time, kids were going on dates and parents were balancing their checkbooks, completely unaware that their lives would be deprived of a boyfriend, a friend, a guiding light, a flickering candle in the heart of greatest darkness. Out in the oblivious world, clocks ticked and time marched on.

In the last bedroom on the left, on the second story of 1111 Glen Oaks Lane, time once more came to a standstill. A shoe box was pulled out from under a plain metal-frame bed. Dust bunnies were brushed off of the lid, which was then removed. Photographs, shiny pebbles, a plastic heart necklace and Cracker Jack plastic-ruby ring were gently pushed aside. Under a small bundle of dried buttercups was a velvet drawstring bag the color of summer dusk, which was carefully lifted out by small, pale hands. The box was set aside, and Daria Morgendorffer took her place at the foot of the bed. She sat silhouetted in one of the room's four windows as she pulled the mouth of the bag open and slid a polished length of brass and steel into the palm of her right hand.

Daria held the harmonica, and she sighed.

Eyes far away, she pulled her glasses off and let them drop softly to the carpet. The velvet bag she draped over the handrail at her left hand as she leaned forward to rest elbows on knees, just above the tears in the worn fabric of her cargo pants. She tilted her head down as she raised the harp to her lips. Her short, straight auburn hair swung forward and tickled her jaw line, the uneven ends stark coal-black against fair skin. Daria flicked it back with her right thumb, took a deep breath, gathered her strength. And began to play.

As the melancholy notes sang through the still air of that Wednesday night, Daria thought of a boy with dark hair and a gap-toothed smile, eyes which seemed to shine liquid green under the summer sun. She thought of long games of tag, scavenger hunts, trading books on rainy afternoons. A smile touched her heart at the memory of the fourth grade talent show, the vision of him in that single spotlight, playing his favorite song.

Her hands caressed the smooth, warm metal and the weak yellow light of the single overhead bulb spilled liquid over the intricate henna tattoos covering her right arm. They began at the tips of her fingers and flowed into the armhole of her dull olive hunting vest to peek out again, climbing the side of her neck like vines. The patterns described on her skin spiraled and flowed in whorls, snaked around muscles and encircled freckles, embraced every curve of her arm in visual rhapsody reminiscent of wind. Or music.

The bluesy melody intensified in mood as visions of clear lakes and abandoned houses flicked across her memory like slides. Drying out on a white-painted raft, skin baking in the afternoon sun as he languished beside her. Racing through dank-smelling halls as an army of cats spilled from every hole and broken window in the old Morris place, screaming laughter as they burst through the rotted front door hand in hand. Sitting in the school yard with skinned knees as he pushed down a bully twice his size, broadening shoulders held square in righteous indignation.

A long, sorrowful note curled through the air as a single tear rolled down her cheek and Daria closed her eyes.

Throughout the house, Jake, Quinn and Helen Morgendorffer froze in their various activities and looked up. Quinn marked her place in her magazine, pulled off her headphones and frowned. Jake lowered the bit of plastic in his hand and removed his glasses. They thunked onto the kitchen table beside a half-finished model plane, brown eyes cloudy with memory. Helen dropped the deposition she was studying into her lap, voice choked off mid-word as a masculine voice buzzed in her ear. She slowly closed her cell phone with numb fingers. Though their thoughts may have been far different, the three family members listened to the harmonica's gritty voice with identical expressions of grief. Each settled in to await the end of this somber concert, former activities forgotten. One by one their eyes closed, hearts aching. Every note was a memory, each memory a wound.

Daria felt the music surrounding her, and she surrendered to it without a moment's struggle. A warm breeze drifted in through the window, ruffled her hair as though attempting comfort and blew on her tears, as if it meant to brush them away. Each wave of anguish that broke over her was channeled into the song, tears dripping from her chin as she lost herself to the music.

A winter night in February played across her eyelids like a home movie on a projector screen. There they stood in a cold, empty park, all smiles and shy eyes. The swings creaked softly to themselves as the teens shared warm words and the boy, missing teeth now grown in straight, and hair carelessly tousled by the cold winter wind, presented a box wrapped in red ribbon to the rosy-cheeked Daria. Nestled within the small box was a teardrop crystal pendant on a delicate silver chain. He took great pleasure in placing it around her neck, fingers lingering in her long hair. The two shared a kiss, and in her ear he breathed words infused with perfect joy.

_Happy Valentine's Day_.

He would have been fifteen that March, if the brakes on his truck had not failed. Daria had not received a call that night, as she normally would have upon his return home. Instead, there was a knock on their front door the next morning, and a perplexed Helen led an officer from the Dallas Police Department into their kitchen. The rest of the family excused themselves, the officer took his seat across from Daria and explained that after driving her home, her boyfriend had lost control of his truck turning south onto Sarasota Circle. Another car had been coming in from Gurley Avenue and the vehicles had collided. There were, he informed her gravely, no survivors. Daria sat numbly and tried to process this information- that her confidante was gone. Her only reaction was to clutch the crystal at her chest and stare numbly into the distance. Tears smudged her glasses and her face paled toward death, but she uttered not a word. She did not speak again for several weeks.

Daria passed her fourteenth birthday at her aunt Amy's apartment the next winter, through her tears practicing Carter James's favorite song on the harmonica that had been given to her by his heartbroken mother before Helen had sent her away. They were in Lawndale the following spring, leaving Daria's boyfriend and only friend cold and lonely behind them. He rested under a white marble headstone in a Dallas cemetery and, for all Daria knew, the bouquet of buttercups she had set on his grave was still there.

The last notes of the song trickled from between Daria's lips and through the harmonica's metal reeds to dissipate in the air. She raised her head, the light caught in the crystal which rested against the front of her black tank top and threw prisms onto the thin carpet. She lowered the harp from tear-wet lips, took a deep, shuddering breath. Daria opened her sad brown eyes.

And time marched onward.

_They are all gone into the world of light,_  
_And I alone sit lingering here;_  
_Their very memory is fair and bright,_  
_And my sad thoughts doth clear._  
~ Henry Vaughan, from Silex Scintillans 'They are all gone'

_What the heart has once known, it shall never forget._  
~Author unknown

**Alpacca Bites**: Thanks to the wonderful Kristen Bealer for much needed beta. The song Daria is playing is "Sad Hours" by Little Walter. A sketch of this world's Daria can be found at http:/ thatlonerchick (dot) deviantart (dot) com/


End file.
